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My own view is somewhat different. In engaging with the world as it is, rather than as one might wish it to be, it is essential to realize that climate engineering is far too enticing and powerful a notion to be shoved aside. Climate engineering is not going away. No new taboo will be erected that forces the climate engineering genie entirely back into its bottle. Desperation is too strong a motivator. And so for me the question is not climate engineering or no climate engineering. The question becomes, are there forms of climate engineering, and ways of conducting the conversation about climate engineering approaches, that can bring out the best in humanity's climate response? Climate engineering is emerging as a key site of political struggle. But the struggle is not just over whether or not climate engineering is a good idea - a bipolar, "to geoengineer or not to geoengineer" debate. Instead, it is a more complex, nuanced struggle, which has to do with the role of engineering within the broader set of responses to climate change, and the particular character of engineering options that might see development or deployment. It will require extraordinary vigilance to ensure that climate engineering technologies are not advanced as some kind of false solution. The task ahead is to push the climate engineering conversation in productive rather than destructive directions. This can best happen to the degree that climate engineering is subjected to careful, early, and well-crafted social oversight. The need for active civic engagement with climate engineering Climate engineering is not some fiendish plot hatched by a group desperate to ward off real action on climate change. It could well serve the same function, though, by distracting us from other, more beneficial actions. Climate engineering certainly fits neatly with current dominant ways of understanding and responding to climate change, by telling us that climate change is a discrete and manageable "problem" that can be tackled via technological means. And yet, at the same time, climate engineering is not something that can be written off or ignored. I have asked here, can any engagement with climate engineering be productive? The answer is, it depends; it rests on how the conversation is engaged. The argument set out above is that consideration of climate engineering is now inevitable, so that the task of those interested in climate politics and political action becomes to ensure that the climate engineering conversation is a productive one. As the chorus of voices calling for consideration of climate engineering continues to grow in size and volume, as it is bound to do, it will become ever more important for a wider array of actors to engage productively in the conversation. Climate engineering is not some aberrant, marginal response to climate change. It is, instead, the expected response of a culture that partly looks to technological solutions to complex societal challenges. Other approaches exist. These need to be heard to guide the direction of climate engineering research and incorporate such forays into the broader challenge of addressing climate change.

What we need to secure environmental protection is, I believe, incentives and institutions; we need green taxes, tradable emission permits, subsidies to local communities protecting rare biotopes, subsidies to development of new climate-friendly technologies. We may need prohibitions, nudges, institutional rules, institutional reforms. To protect the environment, we should focus our attention on the factors affecting actual behaviors of consumers, firms, local communities, and governmental agencies in their everyday activities. Neither cost-benefit analysis nor any other method can provide ethically neutral measures of how important an environmental change is for society. This is true even if we consider only small changes that do not substantially affect the income distribution or relative prices. How important something is for society is, essentially, a normative question. Normative answers require normative premises. An analysis based on specific normative premises cannot, at the same time, be ethically neutral. Still, policy choices must, of course, be made. To do that, one needs to enter into ethical and political discussions. Ethics and politics are important and deserve serious, competent, and thoughtful attention. It is not obvious, however, that the person best suited to take care of those considerations is the project analyst. In a democracy, there are usually others who have been elected by voters to do precisely that. It is my belief that economic analysis can be more useful if, rather than explicitly ranking projects according to their social desirability, it is limited to the task of being systematically descriptive. The central question for the analyst is then not which project is best, but rather what information is most important for decision-makers. Will the environment be forgotten unless one attaches a price tag to it? That is, of course, possible. If one really believes that monetary valuation increases the probability that decision-makers will take environmental considerations into account, this is a strong argument for monetary valuation. Nevertheless, this reasoning may be overly optimistic about the influence of such price tags. If decisions were made solely on the basis of aggregate willingness to pay as estimated in cost-benefit analysis, placing price tags on the environment would be crucially important. But there is little evidence that decisions are made mainly on the basis of aggregate willingness to pay. And after all, why should a price tag be expected to matter if no one has to pay the price written on it?

The Future of Public Understanding and Its Relation to Action The trajectory of public understanding frustrates many climate scientists and educators who see climate risks growing, understand that delayed action will increase the risks further, and believe that concerted action is needed now to reduce them (e.g., Hansen, 2009). Many of these concerned individuals see climate literacy and continuing efforts by scientists to explain what they know as the way to accomplish the objectives of improved public understanding, increased public concern about climate change, and increased public support and action to reduce climate risks. However, unless existing behavioral science evidence collected in different domains of application is brought to bear on climate literacy and education, there is no reason to believe that future efforts will be any more successful in improving public understanding or willingness to take action related to climate change than past efforts have been. Conventional educational and informational programs are unlikely to have a major effect on aggregate public opinion, and more effective strategies need to be devised to improve public understanding and to increase individual and collective action. As political ideology plays a large role in people's beliefs about climate change and their policy support, problems with public understanding are not mainly due to a knowledge deficit but often result from a deficit in trust in the conveyors of climate models and data ( Malka & Krosnick, 2009).¶ Improving Public Understanding¶ Public understanding of climate change needs improvement, but the problem is not one of “illiteracy.” In comparison to the rest of the world, the American public has an average amount of knowledge about climate change and an average understanding of climate change phenomena ( Brechin, 2003). U.S. adults who doubt that climate change is happening, is anthropogenic, or presents serious risks should be assumed not to have a deficit of knowledge but rather to have different understandings. Individuals holding mental models that conflict with the available scientific evidence are not a blank slate, as the metaphor of illiteracy suggests, so the needed educational process is not one of adding to knowledge but one of inducing conceptual change. Research on science education indicates that preconceptions that conflict with scientific understanding can be tenacious and that instruction that does not address them typically fails to help learners adopt mental models that are scientifically accurate ( National Research Council, 2005). A developing literature, focused mainly on teaching fundamental scientific concepts to children, identifies common preconceptions in some areas of science and studies “learning progressions” that can lead learners effectively from their preconceptions to mental models that are consistent with scientific understanding ( National Research Council, 2007). Changing adults' misconceptions about climate change will likely prove more difficult than teaching children, but the general principle of beginning with learners' preexisting mental models surely applies ( Bostrom et al., 1994; Kempton, 1991). What can scientists and educators do to improve U.S. public understanding? We begin by stating a position in favor of “nonpersuasive communication” ( Fischhoff, 2007). Much of value can be gained by efforts to inform the public in ways that are not disguised efforts to engage support for a line of public policy. Thus, it is important for scientists to continue to explain what is and is not known about climate change to journalists, policymakers, and the general public, using normal science education approaches, and to explain the difference between reducible versus irreducible uncertainty. Such efforts will be valuable to people whose understandings already approximate those of scientists, whose understandings are relatively unformed, or who become more open to input from scientists in the future. It is also important to continue to correct errors and mischaracterizations of the science of climate change, which continue to be publicized despite repeated corrections. These efforts are necessary, though unlikely to be sufficient, to raise the level of public understanding in the current politicized environment.¶ Other approaches are needed in addition. One is to explain a simple conceptual frame for understanding climate change that is more congruent with the state of knowledge than the persuasive frames on offer now—a frame that does not claim too much for the ability to make climate predictions or exaggerate the import of existing scientific uncertainties. 7 Recent scientific reports are beginning to define such a frame—one that emphasizes risk or uncertainty management ( Gober, Kirkwood, Balling, Ellis, & Deitrick, 2009; National Research Council, 2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2011; Pollack, 2007). In this frame, climate change is shown to alter the profile of risks from the many events associated with climate, typically increasing such risks, including catastrophic ones. Responses to climate change are presented as options for risk management, not as self-evident responses to a predictable future.¶ The risk management frame is readily understandable. Everyone faces catastrophic risks (from life-threatening diseases, automobile accidents, house fires, and even climate-related events), and everyone understands strategies for managing them. One strategy is to reduce activities that might lead to catastrophe (e.g., controlling our diets, staying off icy roads, or for climate change, adopting energy-efficient and low-emissions technology). Another is to lower the cost of catastrophic events if they occur (e.g., installing air bags and fire extinguishers, buying health and fire insurance, or, with climate change, protecting vital infrastructure and improving early warning and emergency response capabilities). Yet another strategy is to invest in a better understanding of the risk profile and of the likely costs and benefits of the risk management options. People manage risks by employing combinations of these strategies or by employing none of them and taking their chances.

A fear appeal possessing each of these characteristics is not only relatively ethically unproblematic, but is a potentially valuable tool capable of enhancing [End Page 232] public deliberations about some issues. "Civic fear" as developed by Aristotle and explicated within this essay is an emotional disposition with the potential to help the body of deliberators (whether legislators or citizens) to enhance their collective perception of the events threatening the republic. It is the potential of "civic fear" to enhance collective perception of events that allows this emotional state to incline audiences toward deliberation. Once decision makers apprehend the potential dangers posed by events more clearly, they are in a much better position to begin formulating potential courses of action, and weighing which of these actions is likely to preserve the republic from danger. "Civic fear," in other words, is an emotional state that, at its best, opens up deliberative possibilities. This type of fear appeal is to be contrasted with the traditional "dichotomous" fear appeal that is depressingly common in contemporary political discourse, and remains a lightning rod for ongoing humanist suspicions of fear and fear appeals in politics. Such fear appeals, in fact, are often used as strategies to bypass deliberation and scare audiences into adopting a rhetor's preferred alternative (as in the case of the passage of the USA-PATRIOT Act).¶ While this essay falls short of endorsing standard "dichotomous" fear appeals, and even remains skeptical of many of the baser fear appeals populating U.S. political discourse, this is not to suggest that all "dichotomous" fear appeals are inherently irrational or manipulative. Walton's work has established the appropriateness and rationality of some of these traditional fear appeals, and provided some relatively clear rules from traditional argument theory and pragmadialectics in order to assist citizens and critics in their attempt to evaluate them.70 But the cognitive character of this emotion also allows the possibility that the fear appeal can be used in a specifically civic and deliberative mode, as a means to enable citizens and policy makers to better recognize the nature of the problems facing the political community, and to begin thinking about potential solutions. In some respects, appeals to "civic fear" are especially necessary now at a time when many leaders, policy makers, and citizens—due to self-interest, unwarranted confidence, or excessive fear—have turned a blind eye to the very real dangers posed by global warming, fossil fuel dependence, resource depletion, income polarization, increasing corporate control of politics, failing health care systems, record budget deficits, record trade deficits, and the long list of other problems that remain relatively unrecognized by a regime that seems focused solely on an object of fear that is already clearly recognized by all. Under such circumstances, one can only hope that legislators and citizens will possess the courage, as well as the foresight, to face these underappreciated objects of fear, and commence open and vigorous discussions about potential solutions. Perhaps the ongoing abuse of fear appeals by the powerful may eventually itself [End Page 233] become an object of "civic fear," and inspire academics, political leaders, and citizens to even more fundamental deliberations regarding the character of U.S. political discourse, and the fate of the United States itself.

By focusing on technological or administrative solutions rather than the decentralized and often combative responses social movements themselves keep offering up, most academics and writers from the Global North fail to tailor their technocratic proposals to the immediate need for survival, dignity, and direct control by people and communities over our own lives. Social justice and decolonization have become buzz words, but most of the people today who are getting paid to make proposals or write about the problem evince a practice that is deeply colonial. Fortunately, we don’t need them. Proposals for dignity, survival, and self-organization are popping up like mushrooms after the rain, originating in affected communities themselves.

The political problem posed by the question of technology for anti-capitalist struggle is perhaps the most difficult to confront. On the one hand we know all too well that the evolution of technologies, marked as it is by a good deal of autonomous 'combinatorial' logic of the sort that Arthur describes, is a form of big business in which class struggle and inter-capitalist and interstate competition have played leading roles for the 'human purpose' of sustaining military dominance, class power and perpetual accumulation of capital. We also see that capital's actions are steering closer and closer to the abyss of the loss of social labour as an underlying regulatory principle that prevents the descent of capital into lawlessness. On the other hand we also know that any struggle to combat worldwide. environmental degradation, social inequalities and impoverishment, perverse population dynamics, deficits in global health, education and nutrition, and military and geopolitical tensions will entail the mobilisation of many of our currently available technologies to achieve non-capitalistic social, ecological and political ends. The existing bundle of technologies, saturated as they are in the mentalities and practices of capital's search for class domination, contains emancipatory potentialities that somehow have to be mobilised in anti-capitalist struggle. In the short term, of course, the left is bound to defend jobs and skills under threat. But, as the miserable history of the noble rearguard action fought against deindustrialisation in the 1970s and 198os demonstrates, this will likely be a losing battle against a newly emerging technological configuration from the very beginning. An anti-capitalist movement has in the current conjuncture to reorganise its thinking around the idea that social labour is becoming less and less significant to how the economic engine of capitalism functions. Many of the service, administrative and professional jobs the left currently seeks to defend are on the way out. Most of the world's population is becoming disposable and irrelevant from the standpoint of capital, which will increasingly rely upon the circulation of Technology, Work and Human Disposability fictitious forms of capital and fetishistic constructs of value centred on the money form and within the credit system. As is to be expected, some populations are held to be more disposable than others, with the result that women and people of colour bear most of the current burden and will probably do so even more in the foreseeable future. 13 Martin Ford correctly poses the question: how will the resultant disposable and redundant population live (let alone provide a market) under such conditions? A viable long-term and imaginative answer to this question has to be devised by any anti-capitalist movement. Commensurate organised action and planning to meet the new eventualities and the provision of sufficient use values must be thought through and gradually implemented. This has to be done at the same time as the left has also to mount a rearguard action against the technologies of increasingly predatory practices of accumulation by dispossession, further bouts of deskilling, the advent of permanent joblessness, ever-increasing social inequality and accelerating environmental degradation. The contradiction that faces capital morphs into a contradiction that necessarily gets internalised within anti-capitalist politics.

There is, however, an overlooked utopian feature in the environmental eco· modern discourse. To date, there have been numerous studies about the history of environmental politics, especially with regard to how ecological modernization came into being, as well as research about its spread in different areas (e.g. Mol and Sonnenfeld, 2000). But very few analyse the visionary and utopian aspects that may explain how any such approach to politics can gain so much acceptance when it is described as a salvation from contemporary problems that are presented as apocalyptic. The ecomodern utopia's combination of the desire for a lost paradise with the promise of heaven meant that its proponents could argue that the chance for humanity to be saved was imminent. There is a clear determinism in the Industrial Fatalist dis· course, which becomes visible when every critique is brushed away with arguments of backwardness, earthen floors and poverty and puts the elements of time and progress in the hands of Liberal- Conservatives. These types of utopian ideas can be described as "millenarianism". The millennial good time restores something of the glory of a Golden Age, but it is also descri· bed as being at the end of time. Millenarianism is historically associated with Christianity's messianic message. This has created a dynamic dimension to the forward-looking determinism that encourages the acts of a selected few (Kumar, 1991), which is similar to the way that Sweden is described as being the frontrunner in climate-change politics. A green economy or eco-efficient economy is a partial critique of the present society, a critique based on scientific language. The solution can be seen as a form of millenarianism in the sense that those in government create a distinct actor network that infuses hope and creates a way out of the dilemma. The hope is infinite since it offers the prospect of the ultimate society, in the form of an eco-efficient economy. In line with the ecologically modern discourse, an "eco-efficient economy" is presented as an utopia that launches a couple of technological fixes, which means that contemporary society does not need to change fundamentally. Although the description of an utopia always contains a critique of the prevailing society, it need not necessarily be a total alternative to it (Kumar, 1987). An eco-efficient economy can instead be described as the opposite: a conservative utopia. Society is merely extrapolated from the present to the future, with some technological fixes added. Such utopias are characterized by the existence of a great faith in technology, although detailed descriptions of technology are left out. The direction that the society is moving towards is not altered although the pace of change is said to be increased (Segal, 1986). The image of conservative utopias is made attractive as a result of their effectiveness, purity, absence of noise and harmonious conditions. The government would be left to the experts, not citizens, which would create effective communities (Segal, 1986). The analysis of Sweden as a frontrunner and the ideal eco-efficient economy demonstrates that the understanding of utopia as a system-change is not valid. Such a limited understanding of utopia tends to reduce the possibility of certain types of utopias; conservative utopias might be dismissed from analytical scrutiny. In the case of the ecoefficient economy, it is not about changing existing institutions, behaviour or power relations, even if utopia in many other cases contains the call for radical change. Climate change is a much contested field. We find that during the period that we studied, the dominant discourse, Industrial Fatalism, was heavily attacked for not being able to manage the problem; simultaneously this discourse invested strong emotions in the image of Sweden as a frontrunner country while making the lowering of carbon emissions and continued economic growth a possibility, through an eco-efficient economy. By framing climate change as a problem for humanity, actors within the Industrial Fatalist discourse matched their deep-anchored faith in large-scale technologies, such as nuclear power, with comic apocalyptic scenarios in which they were in control. The comic apocalypse was co-created with human solutions presented in a powerful way. Industrial Fatalist actors presented themselves as being able to manage both the problem and the answer. This proposed solution was halted - to a large extent, globally - after Germany decided to abandon nuclear power and Japan stopped all nuclear operations after the Fukushima disaster; at the same time, the UK and Finland were prominent examples of the opposite (Wittneben, 2012). In Sweden, as of 2014, the LiberalConservative government still supported the plan to swap old nuclear power plants for new ones and continue the dependency on uranium supplied by Ukraine and Russia. The post-political situation in which apocalyptic framing can occur simultaneously with conservative action is possible because the apocalypse, through its comic presentation, is made governable by humans and is met concurrently by big emotionally embedded planetary engineering solutions that offer the assurance that the industrial capitalist world's ecological system can handle climate change.

The problem is, when governments try to mandate such sweeping changes from above, the most marginalized elements in society, and also non-human life that is excluded from personhood, get crushed. Top-down reforestation efforts frequently result in land grabs that dispossess Indigenous peoples and agricultural communities and frequently benefit logging, tourism, and other major industries. They are also inca pable of spreading actual forests, which are complex multigenerational habitats uniquely adapted to the local territory. So-called reforestation from above is designed by people who don’t even understand the difference between a monocrop tree plantation and a thriving ecosystem with trees, nor do they have a financial or spiritual interest in learning that difference.

Chile provides a key example of a neocolonial country with an extractivist economy: its main sectors are copper mining and logging. On paper, Chile is listed as a heavily forested country, and it uses these supposed forests to economic gain, in the form of carbon credits. In fact, the country has very few actual forests left. Much of the loss can be traced to when the brutal Pinochet dictatorship transferred huge swathes of Mapuche lands to the logging industry, which destroyed most of the remaining native forests and replaced them with monocrop plantations of non-native eucalyptus and pine. The plantations are killing the soil, lowering the water table, and depriving the Mapuche of the species they traditionally rely on for their food, ceremonies, and medicine.

Using a neoliberal framework to craft solutions to climate change produces a vicious circle that reinstates the selfsame social organization and broader sociocultural and economic structures that have led to global climate change. The Wrath of Capital shows that climate change is not just an economic, cultural, or technological challenge. It is a political dilemma. Rigorous thinking and broadening our understanding of flourishing and emancipatory politics are important resources we can use to counter the narrow-minded view that the free market will solve the challenges climate change poses. The central focus of The Wrath of Capital is how ‘opportunity’ is put to work in climate change politics. Is it a moralizing or political operation? The conclusion I draw is that thus far the neoliberal framework of climate change politics has turned it into a moralizing discourse. For as I show the discourse exposes a racist, sexist, privileged political subject who points the finger of blame in the direction of underdeveloped countries overpopulating the earth, the Chinese polluting the atmosphere, ‘primitive societies’ in need of ‘modernizing’ their economies and governments, and an inefficient and ineffectual public sphere that should hand the ownership and management of common pool resources over to the private sector. All are moralizing arguments presented under the umbrella of climate change solutions. It is therefore important we recognize these are not political arguments. Arguments of this kind do not view the ‘opportunity’ in question as a platform for transforming otherwise oppressive, exploitative, and coercive power relations.

The alternative to ecocide is not a simplistic plan for carbon reduction on a schedule that will not be met, and even if it were could not avert a catastrophe that is already upon us. The alternative is the networking of thousands of empowered territo- ries, each one approaching the horizon of a complex imagined future that prioritizes the health and happiness of that territory and its inhabitants. To achieve that, we do not have to await the timetables of economists and engineers advising us how to incentivize powerful, murderous institutions to make the needed changes at their own pace, without rocking the boat too much.

What we need to do instead is to find the seeds of those empowered territories all around us, nurture them, cultivate them, and link them in a rhizomatic web that will become stronger than any institution of the ecocidal system that is already falling to ruin, strong enough so that as many of our living communities as possible—human and non-human, all enmeshed—will survive the upheavals and disturbances as our planet tries to heal from centuries of abuse.

Any attempt to define Aboriginal paradigms through western ideology is unreasonable because customary Aboriginal law has evolved from a non-related set of beliefs, values and law systems.54 In Mabo v Queensland (No 2)55 the Torres Strait Islander plaintiffs, from their cultural perspective, challenged the English concept of possession and property law as alien to Indigenous inhabitants.56 The Mabo v Queensland (No 2) judgment recognised that Australian law could accommodate Aboriginal rights to land and waters and not ‘fracture the skeletal frame’57 of Australia’s legal system – according to the common law recognition test.58 Landmark decisions such as this drew international attention to the right of Indigenous self-determination and the potential of legislative empowerment through rights-based systems.

Historically, the rights of nature movement has evolved from a philosophical enquiry into the relationship of humans and the natural environment to blend the philosophical study of ethics and to question the moral behaviour of humans towards animals and the environment.59 There are a range of issues that have been raised including the moral question of utilising animals for consumption, exploiting animals for human use and an ethical resistance to ownership of animals.60 The work of authors such as Rene Descartes is used to contend that animals are seen merely as machines;61 which is not consistent with Indigenous Australians concept of the environment and humans as a ‘web of relationships’.62 The utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham is used to challenge the socio-legal system that values animals below humans;63 this view is not consistent with the law and culture of Indigenous peoples.64 Other examples canvassed contend that property rights over animals and nature exercised by humans inevitably leads to exploitation and the abuse of power.65 Langton (2005) described the relationship of property and the Pama peoples of Far North Queensland thus:

Specifically, I want to present the hypothesis that promises of justice and universal salvation from climate chaos by means of GNDs in the global North may obscure their embeddedness in contemporary colonial relations of injustice, which remain premised on assumptions of race and social difference. I want to highlight the ways in which GND discourse and practice may downplay, or render invisible, the consequences that low-carbon transition plans have for the communities and ecosystems who are called upon--or even expected--to provide the infrastructure for such salvation. The resources that are seen as vital for northern Green New Deals are very often located in the global South, and this has serious consequences for environmental justice. The concern here is that the communities and ecosystems from which these resources are extracted risk becoming Green Sacrifice Zones; and that the sacrifice zone logic will be expanded to include other sites necessary for the sourcing, transportation, installation, operation and waste clear-up that goes along with the creation of the infrastructure for a just transition. (2)

As GNDs advance in some parts of the global North, and are enthusiastically adopted by vigorous civil society organisations, it is important for civil society and environmental activism to draw attention to the risk and policy implications of a proliferation of green sacrifice zones, among policy-makers and activist circles.

If any issue lends itself towards a critique of the ethical choices and limits of traditional approaches to security, it is environmental change. Until recently, the " environment- was not seen as an issue relevant to the study or practice of security, despite the obvious fact that the natural world provides the conditions for human existence. Where environmental issues are seen as relevant to security, these are often viewed through the lens of national security. This is the case even though ecological zones and national borders do not usually coincide, and even though unilateral state action is insufficient for responding to global environmental change. In discussions of the environment-security relationship, environmental issues are often viewed as relevant to the study and practice of security if triggering armed conflict or related threats to national sovereignty such as large-scale population displacement. At its most ethically perverse, measures to redress environmental change are viewed as threats to the economic security of states. This highlights a more general problem. if security is approached as the preservation of the status quo whether defined in terms of the territorial integrity of the state or the preservation of international order it becomes harder to respond effectively to environmental change worsened by taken-for-granted elements of national and international governance. Simply put, international economic and political governance arrangements (the neoliberal economic system and the interstate system) are failing in their capacity to arrest processes of environmental change at best, and, at worst, are driving these processes of global change. In many ways, then, environmental change represents something of an "easy" case for the global security framework developed in this book. Some environmental issues, and responses to them, can only be approached at the global level. And dominant national security discourses encourage inadequate and in some cases perverse responses to environmental change. However, dynamics of global environmental change do not necessarily represent the easy case for a cosmopolitan approach to security that they may initially suggest. Complex questions arise about whether a cosmopolitan approach can come to terms with obligations to future generations and other living beings; about how we might mobilize responses to global security threats in a world of states; and even about how the "environment" itself is understood and approached. And of course for many, linking security and the environment is fraught in a political sense, either because the language of security does not increase the urgency or priority attached to environmental issues ( McDonald 2012a; Waver 2011), or because it risks endorsing problematic actors and responses to issues of environmental change (see Deudney 1990; Kakonen 1994). This chapter tackles these issues directly, building a case for an approach to environmental change that focuses on the global level, that recognizes obligations to future generations and other living beings, and that emphasizes the responsibility that everyone has to act as global environmental stewards. This case for a global security perspective, however, is preceded by a discussion of the ethical assumptions and implications of attempts to link the environment and security in theory and in practice. Here we suggest the need for attention to how the "environment" itself is understood, and to the key question of whose security is seen as worth protecting or advancing in the context of environmental change in particular. In the latter section of the chapter we focus on global climate change in illustrating the utility of our global security perspective.

Ethical questions and debates loomed large over such attempts to broaden the security agenda. The attempts to broaden this agenda to include issues such as environmental change were driven by normative commitments to addressing such problems, underpinned by the idea that with their designation as security threats would conic increased political profile, attention, funding and priority for these " neglected" issues. Indeed authors advocating the "broadening" of security in this way frequently emphasized the opportunity costs of the billions of dollars spent by states on armies and tools of war relative to more important priorities such as official development assistance or renewable energy (Mathews 1989). It is no coincidence, in this sense, that a range of authors arguing for the redefinition of security to include environmental concerns were affiliated with environmental NGOs or think-tanks aimed at mobilizing responses to environmental change (see Hartmann 2009; McDonald 2013a). There is much that is intuitively appealing about the attempt to lift issues such as environmental change onto the security agenda as a means of challenging the traditional association of security with the state and war, not least given the problematic priorities underpinning this discourse of security. Yet, while working from assumptions about the mobilizing power of security, these accounts failed to reflect on the politics of security itself. As Daniel Deudney (1990) asked, is it wise to assume that "security" has this progressive effect; that promoting environmental issues to the realm of security won't bring with it a militarization of such problems and logics of exceptionalism? Such a failure to systematically examine what security does is problematic: it opens "broadeners" up to the criticism that theirs is a project that potentially invites illiberal political practices and institutions to hold sway over the management of pressing transnational political problems like climate change and environmental degradation. In a more fundamental sense, the "broadening" agenda also risks leaving security power and legitimacy where it is. There is a danger that without redefining who security is actually for, issues such as environmental change might come to be seen as security threats to the extent that they are solely understood as threats to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the nation-state. Not only might we fail to challenge the statism of contemporary global politics, but we risk encouraging perverse responses to problems such as environmental change. States might recognize climate change as a threat, but if such a response is oriented towards realist strategic concerns, states with relative self-sufficiency may build physical barriers (even walls) around their borders to protect against an influx of so-called " environmental refugees" a scenario anticipated in a 2003 Pentagon report on the national security implications of climate change (Schwartz and Randall 2003). These issues are discussed in more depth in Chapter 4. In our view, security ethics is best honoured by more fundamentally questioning the meaning, structure, and ends of security. If we simply add poverty, environmental change, or disease to the list of challenges to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state, we leave other key constituent elements of security in place, and enable existing security providers to embrace and potentially co-opt this "broader agenda", blunting more radical critiques of the association of security and the state system. Indeed it is probably no coincidence that recognition of the "broader range of threats" to security has found its way in to security statements and agenda of existing institutional security providers.

Resource managerialism can be read as the essence of today's enviro-mentality. While voices in favour of conservation can be found in Europe early in the 19th century, there is a self-reflexive establishment of this stance in the United States in the late 19th century. From the 1880's to the 1920's, one saw the closing of the western frontier. And whether one looks at John Muir's preservationist programs or Gifford Pinchot's conservationist code, there is a spreading awareness of modern industry's power to deplete nature's stock of raw materials, which sparks wide-spread worries about the need to find systems for conserving their supply from such unchecked exploitation. Consequently, nature's stocks of materials are rendered down to resources, and the presumptions of resourcification become conceptually and operationally well entrenched in conservationist philosophies. The fundamental premises of resource managerialism in many ways have not changed over the past century. At best, this code of practice has only become more formalized in many governments' applications and legal interpretations. Working with the managerial vision of the second industrial revolution, which tended to empower technical experts like engineers or scientists, who had gotten their degrees from agricultural schools, mining schools, technology schools like the one I work at, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, which prides itself as they say on producing the worker bees of industry. Or, on the shop floor and professional managers, one found corporate executives and financial officers in the main office, who are of course trained in business schools. Put together, resource managerialism casts corporate administrative frameworks over nature in order to find the supplies needed to feed the economy and provision society through national and international markets. As scientific forestry, range management, and mineral extraction took hold in the U.S. during this era, an ethos of battling scarcity guided professional training, corporate profit making, and government policy. As a result, the operational agendas of what was called sustained yield were what directed the resource managerialism of the 20th century. In reviewing the enabling legislation of key federal agencies, one quickly discovers that the values and practices of resourcification anchor their institutional missions in a sustained yield philosophy. As Cortner and Moote observe, the statutory mandates for both the Forest Service, the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, and the National Forest Management Act, and the Bureau of Land Management, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, for example, specifically direct these agencies to employ a multiple use sustained yield approach to resource management. More often than not, however, these agencies adjusted their multiple use concept to correspond to their primary production objective -- timber in the case of the Forest Service, grazing in terms of the Bureau of Land Management. Although sustained help is not specifically mentioned in the legislated mandate of agencies such as the National Parks Service or the Bureau of Reclamation, they too have traditionally managed for maximum sustained yield of a single resource - visitor use in the case of the parks, water supply in the case of water resources. So the ethos of resourcification imagined nature as a vast input/output system. The mission statements of sustained yield pushed natural resource management towards realizing the maximum maintainable output up to or past even the point where one reached ecological collapse, which in turn of course caused wide-spread ecological degradation, which leads to the project of rehabilitation managerialism.¶ The acknowledgement of ecological degradation is not tremendously difficult. Indeed, the will to manage environments arises from this wide-spread recognition back in the 19th century. One obvious outcome of building and then living around the satanic mills of modern industrial capitalism was pollution of the air, water, and land. As it continued and spread, the health of humans, plants, and wildlife obviously suffered, while soils and waters were poisoned. Yet the imperatives of economic growth typically drove these processes of degradation until markets fell, technologies changed, or the ecosystem collapsed. At that juncture, business and government leaders, working at the local, regional, and national level, were faced with hard choices about either relocating people and settlements in industry to start these cycles of degradation anew, or maybe rehabilitating those existing economic and environmental assets to revitalize their resource extractive or commodity producing potential. Rehabilitation management then is about keeping production going in one way or another. Agricultural lands that once produced wheat might be turned to dairy production or low-end fibre outputs. Polluted water courses, poisoned soils, and poverty-stricken workers can all be remobilized in environmental rehabilitation schemes to revive aquatic ecologies, renew soil productivity, and replenish bank accounts. The engagements of rehabilitation management are to find a commodifiable or at least a valuable possibility in the brown fields of agricultural excess and industrial exhaustion. Even after decades of abuse, there are useful possibilities that always lie dormant in slag heaps, derelict factories, overused soil, polluted waterways, and rust belt towns. Management must search for and then implement strategies for their rehabilitation. Such operations can shift agricultural uses, refocus industrial practices, turn lands into eco-preserves, and retrain workers. But the goals here are not return ecosystems to some pristine natural state. On the contrary, its agendas are those of sustaining the yields of production. Of course, what will be yielded and at what levels it is sustained and for which environmental ends all remains to be determined. On the one hand, the motives of rehabilitation management are quite rational, because these moves delay or even cancel the need to sacrifice other lands, air, and soil preserves at other sites. Thus nature is perhaps protected elsewhere or at large by renewing industrial brown fields in agriculturalized domains for some ongoing project of industrial growth. On the other hand, rehabilitation managerialism may only shift the loci and the foci of damage, rehabilitating eco-systemic degradation caused in one commodity chain, while simply redirecting the inhabitants of these sites to suffer new, albeit perhaps more regulated and rational levels, of environmental contamination in other commodity chains. If one doesn't want to rehabilitate what has been ruined, one can then perhaps get into restoring it.¶ So a restoration managerialism is a recognition that lies at the root of many environmental problems that has sparked a reaction so intense that many called for going beyond rehabilitation and returning to some status quo anti. The call is first stop exploiting nature's endowments, and then move towards restoring those sites in systems that have been most abused. Ecological restoration, however, is a very tricky proposition, because what is to be restored? How will it be reclaimed? Who must revive what has been damaged, and exactly which prior state of existence is to be privileged as the state of restoration? Most appeals for restoration are made on aesthetic grounds. But restoration management has also developed more macrological engagements for maintaining the integrity of the earth's carrying capacity. In this respect, restoration managerialism focuses upon mobilizing all of the biological, physical, and social sciences to address the major economic and political affects of current environmental problems. Their resourcifications allow ecosystem managers to infrastructuralize all of the earth's ecologies in the name of an almost complete restoration for some biomes, bioregions or biosystems. The earth becomes, if only in terms of contemporary technoscience, an immense terrestrial engine. Serving as the human race's ecological support system, it has, with only the occasional localized failures (as restorationists like to say), provided services upon which human society depends consistently and without charge. As the environmental infrastructure of technoscientific production, the earth then can continue to generate these ecosystem services or their derivative products of natural systems, but only if they are restored. So this complex system of systems is what must survive, and its outputs include of course what we know: the generation of soils, the regeneration of plant nutrients, the capture of solar energy, the conversion of that solar energy into biomass, the accumulation, purification and distribution of water, the control of pests, the provision of a genetic library, the maintenance of breathable air, the control of micro and macro climates, pollination of plants, diversification of animal species, development of buffering mechanisms in eco-catastrophes. And, at the end of the day, some aesthetic enrichment to make it all seem worthwhile. Because it is the true capital stock of trans-national enterprise, the planet's ecology requires such highly disciplined treatment in order to restore some of its original capacities, and then guide perhaps its subsequent sustainable use. Restoring as much or as many as possible of these ecosystems is very important, because it might even bring back some almost extinct ecosystems to enlarge our existing carrying capacity. That in turn leads to another engagement, which is renewables managerialism.

The desirability of shifting to certain inexhaustible or renewable energy sources is obvious. What is not so widely recognized, however, is that these sources too have their costs - in terms of installation, collection, maintenance, and transmission - and that therefore none of them, despite whatever abundance may characterize their occurrence in nature, can offer unlimited accessibility for energy supply.10 Some of the alternative sources, such as hydrogen and biomass, themselves require significant if not prohibitive energy inputs. Biomass (burning biological materials as fuel) also threatens to reduce the land-area available for growing food. Hydrogen, for its part, carries the danger of leakage and of rising to the stratosphere, where it could destroy the ozone layer. Tapping geothermal energy can, in certain regions, risk provoking seismic disturbances; in addition, there may be high costs associated with the depth of requisite drilling, and the emerging heat may be dissipated in various ways. Wind energy, despite its clear positive potential, is limited by materials and space requirements, as well as by the irregularity of its source in many locations. Tidal power is more continuous than wind energy, but in addition to the high installation cost of its requisite barrages or underwater turbines, it poses - as do wind turbines - certain dangers for resident or migrant wildlife. Solar energy, finally, is extraordinarily promising in direct localized applications, but for power generation on a large scale, it would risk impinging on space required for other purposes. As for solar collectors situated in otherwise unused desert regions, their dust-free maintenance in such sites would require the long-distance trans-shipment of vast quantities of water. All these technologies, with the partial exception of biomass, avoid adding to the net concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The same might perhaps be said of nuclear power, provided that, as the more up-to-date versions promise, it does not entail further largescale mining and refinement of fissionable material. Nuclear power has other problematic implications, however, beyond its daunting startup costs in both time and money. Even if we were to suppose - as is further claimed - that the problem of waste has been minimized via repeated re-use (until there is hardly any radioactive material left) and that the dangers of a Chernobyl-type disaster or of vulnerability to military attack have been addressed by engineering improvements,11 there still remains the fact that nuclear power is linked to the potential for making bombs, and no disarmament process is underway. The imperialist governments will therefore not allow nuclear power to be distributed on a scale sufficient to match the potential global demand for it. The longer-term ecological and political desideratum would not be to undo such restrictions, but rather to impose them on the imperialist powers themselves, as part of a full-scale conversion process. The upshot of all these considerations is that the question of how to supply the world's currently growing energy demand without continuing recourse to carbon dioxide-producing fossil fuels - coal, oil, and natural gas - has not yet been solved. In view of the problems associated with all the alternative energy sources, a radical and comprehensive reconsideration of the demand side of this equation would seem to be called for. This is the essence of the socialist response: while encouraging the use of various safe-energy alternatives, it can accept the fact that these alternatives are ultimately limited in their total power-generating capacity, and therefore that the world's aggregate energy consumption will actually have to be reduced. Once this is understood, one can then focus on the interrelated issues of how to identify and prioritize real needs, and how to correspondingly reorganize society in such a way as to assure everyone's well-being. This is beyond the purview of capitalist thought, whatever its level of awareness of the environmental danger.

(Chris Williams, author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis, reports on an independent investigation into Japan’s nuclear nightmare, July 28, 2012, “NUCLEAR ENERGY: Capitalism’s Disastrous Priority,” http://www.dianuke.org/nuclear-energy-capitalisms-disastrous-priority/)

Put another way, the decisions taken were dictated by the prime directive of capitalism: make profits at all costs, grow by any means necessary. Cut whatever corners you need to, bribe and cajole whoever is necessary, denigrate and belittle those who oppose you–there is no higher power to which you will answer other than the God of Profit. This is the iron law of capital accumulation.

The potential to use nuclear fission or fusion to produce power has been known about for around a century but it was only after the Second World War that it was actually realised. Thus, while its general context is that outlined above, the specific context is the post-war situation dominated by the rivalry between the USA and USSR and the nuclear arms race that resulted. The development of nuclear power is thus not only inextricably linked to that of nuclear weapons but was arguably a smokescreen for the latter.¶ In the early 1950s the American government was concerned about the public’s response to the danger of the nuclear arsenal it was assembling and the strategy of first strike that was being propounded. It’s response was to organise a campaign known as Operation Candor to win the public over through adverts across the media (including comic books) and a series of speeches by President Eisenhower that culminated in the announcement at the UN General Assembly of the ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme to “encourage world-wide investigation into the most effective peacetime uses of fissionable materials.”[19] The plan included sharing information and resources, and the US and USSR jointly creating an international stockpile of fissionable material. In the years that followed the arms race went on unabated and nuclear weapons spread to other powers, often under the guise of a civilian nuclear power programme, as in Israel and India. The initial reactors produced large quantities of material for nuclear weapons and small amounts of very expensive electricity. The sharing of nuclear knowledge became part of global imperialist struggles; thus in the late 1950s Britain secretly supplied Israel with heavy water for the reactor it was building with French assistance.[20]¶ Despite talk about energy too cheap to meter, nuclear power has never fulfilled this promise and has relied on state support to cover its real cost. Even where private companies build and run plants there are usually large open or hidden subsidies. For example privatisation of the nuclear industry in Britain failed when Thatcher attempted it in the 1980s because private capital identified there were unquantifiable costs and risks. It was only in 1996, when the ageing Magnox reactors that would soon need decommissioning were excluded from the deal that private investors were prepared to buy British Energy at a knockdown price of £2bn. Six years later the company had to be bailed out with a £10bn government loan.[21]¶ While advocates of nuclear energy today argue that it is cheaper than other sources this remains a questionable assertion. In 2005 the World Nuclear Association, stated that “In most industrialized countries today, new nuclear power plants offer the most economical way to generate base-load electricity even without consideration of the geopolitical and environmental advantages that nuclear energy confers” and published a range of data to support the claim that construction, financing, operating and waste and decommissioning costs have all reduced.[22] Between 1973 and 2008 the proportion of energy from nuclear reactors grew from 0.9% of the global total to 5.8%.[23]¶ A report published in 2009, commissioned by the German Federal Government,[24] makes a far more critical evaluation of the economics of nuclear power and questions the idea that there is a nuclear renaissance underway. The report points out that the number of reactors has fallen over the last few years in contrast to the widespread forecasts of increases in both reactors and the power produced. The increase in the amount of power generated that has taken place during this period is the result of upgrading the existing reactors and extending their operational life. It goes on to argue that there is a lot of uncertainty about the reactors currently described as being ‘under construction’, with a number having been in this position for over 20 years. The number under construction has fallen from the peak of over 200 in 1980 to below 50 in 2006.¶ As regards the economics of nuclear power, the report points to the high level of uncertainty in all areas including financing, construction, operation and decommissioning. It shows that the state remains central to all nuclear projects, regardless of who they are formally owned and operated by. One aspect of this is the various forms of subsidy provided by the state to support capital costs, waste management and plant closure and price support. Another has been the necessity for the state to limit the liability of the industry in order for the private sector to accept the risks. Thus in 1957 the US government stepped in when insurance companies refused to agree insurance because they were unable to quantify the risk.[25] Today it is estimated that “In general national limits are in the order of a few hundred million Euro, less than 10% of the cost of building a plant and far less than the cost of the Chernobyl accident.”[26]¶ The dangers of nuclear energy are as fiercely debated as the costs and the scientific evidence seems to be very variable. This is particularly the case with the Chernobyl disaster where the estimates of the deaths that resulted vary widely. A World Health Organisation Report found that 47 the 134 emergency workers initially involved had died as a result of contamination by 2004[27] and estimated that there would be just under 9,000 excess deaths from cancer as a result of the disaster.[28] A report by Russian scientists published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences estimated that from the date of the accident until 2006 some 985,000 additional deaths had resulted from the accident from cancer and a range of other diseases.[29]¶ For those without specialist medical and scientific knowledge this is difficult to unravel, but what is less questionable is the massive level of secrecy and falsification that runs from the decision by the British government to withhold publication of the report into one of the first accidents in the industry at Windscale in 1957 to Fukishima today where the true scale of the disaster only emerged slowly. Returning to Chernobyl, the Russian government did not report the accident for several days, leaving the local population to continue living and working amidst the radiation. But it was not only Russia. The French government minimised the radiation levels reaching the country[30] and told its population that the radiation cloud that spread across the whole of Europe had not passed over France![31] Meanwhile the British government reassured the country that there was no risk to health, reporting levels of radiation that were forty times lower than they actually were[32], and then quarantined hundreds of farms. As late as 2007 374 farms in Britain still remained under the special control scheme.[33]¶ Nuclear energy is being pushed by various governments as a ‘green’ solution to the problems associated with fossil fuels. This is largely a smokescreen to hide the real motives, which are concerns about the possible exhaustion of oil, the increasing price of oil and the risks associated with a dependence on energy resources outside the state’s control. This green facade is slipping as the economic crisis leads states to return to coal[34] and to push down the costs of exploiting new sources of oil, much of which is physically hard to access, or requires processes that pollute and despoil the environment, such as coal-tar sands. Energy supplies have also been a factor in the imperialist struggles over recent years and it seems likely that this may increase in the period ahead. Nuclear energy then comes back to where it started as a source of fissile material and a cover for weapons programmes.

Despite the fact that industrial natural gas ¶ development is initiated at the national and ¶ global scales, land use decision-making and ¶ impacts are felt at the local scale where rural ¶ stakeholders (who often utilize diverse, resourcebased livelihood strategies) must compete for ¶ the same land and water resources as fossil fuel ¶ developers. This brings into focus why oil and ¶ gas firms aggressively try to control the discourse ¶ about the hydro-social cycle. Importantly, desires ¶ to expand local economic growth opportunities are ¶ ever-present, and landowners are often motivated ¶ to lease their property to extraction firms based ¶ on complex, multi-scalar arguments that center on ¶ this possibility. This has created strong tensions ¶ between proponents and opponents, particularly ¶ because water is both abundant in northeastern PA ¶ and is argued to be just another economic input in ¶ the broader picture. This is in opposition to water ¶ as a multi-faceted, multi-value resource that can be ¶ readily degraded, perhaps irrevocably in the natural ¶ gas industrial production process.¶ Harvey (2005) has broadly posited that neoliberal ¶ strategies are enacted to ensure the consolidation ¶ of capital into specific hands, and Bakker (2010) ¶ suggests that water is a ‘final frontier’ for capitalism. ¶ While we agree, this does not sufficiently explain why the multi-scalar, pro-fracking arguments are ¶ effective. We know, for example, that the arguments ¶ are intellectually weak: natural gas extraction is not ¶ “green” (Howarth et al. 2011); shale gas will not ¶ likely get the nation “off” of foreign oil (Tyndall ¶ Centre 2011); fracking poses serious risks to water ¶ quality and is in need of stronger regulations (Parfitt ¶ 2010; Jackson et al. 2011). Also the process is ¶ driven by specific interests (e.g., America’s Natural ¶ Gas Alliance). We suggest, then, the issue is less ¶ about the argument, and more about the way the ¶ hydro-social cycle is framed in support of fracking.¶ Fletcher (2010) suggests that neoliberalism is ¶ a “general strategy of governing human action” ¶ (171), or a way of ‘conducting conduct’ (Foucault ¶ 2008; Fletcher 2010, 173). In other words, ¶ neoliberalism is not just an argument, but also a ¶ strategy for reworking societies’ perception of, and ¶ relationship to, the non-human world (McCarthy ¶ and Prudham 2004; Heynen et al. 2007). Since, at ¶ the outset, environmental concerns are often seen ¶ in opposition to development, fracking proponents ¶ must co-opt, define, and control the meaning ¶ of environmental resources. This first means ¶ redefining the value of water as an economic input, ¶ so that its degradation makes sense in a broader ¶ benefit/cost framework. Thus the hydro-social cycle ¶ is less a relationship between people and water, ¶ but rather a commodity that can be monetized for ¶ global markets (Finewood and Porter 2010). One ¶ can observe the effectiveness of such a practice ¶ through the sacrifices that individuals are expected ¶ to make for their – and the nation’s – economic ¶ future. In other words, people must exchange their ¶ noneconomic resources for economic resources, as ¶ if they were simply interchangeable.¶ In this scenario, firms are the legitimate source of ¶ knowledge and information. Neoliberal approaches ¶ to environmental governance suggest “rolling back” ¶ environmental regulations (Peck and Tickell 2002), ¶ tacitly celebrating the knowledge and experience of ¶ private industry. In this case, with a lack of funding ¶ for regulatory agencies and a general disdain for ¶ environmental concerns when framed as opposing ¶ economic development, a knowledge vacuum is ¶ created for oil and gas firms to fill. Firms become ¶ the de facto expertise on the environmental impacts ¶ of fracking as well as the expert counterpoint to ¶ anti-fracking voices. In addition, as the fracking process happens up to a mile under the surface of ¶ the ground, in largely inaccessible and rural areas, ¶ and often on private property, the full spatial and ¶ temporal impacts of the process occur largely outof-sight, leaving stakeholders very few alternatives ¶ but to seek information from oil and gas firms.¶ Finally, as the neoliberalization of the hydrosocial cycle becomes taken-for-granted, or common ¶ sense, those who speak up for water resources ¶ as a human/non-human right are increasingly ¶ marginalized. The refrain of environmentalists ¶ as “anti-jobs,” “being out of touch with reality,” ¶ and/or “prioritizing nature over people” has ¶ become relatively common trope in U.S. society. ¶ Even those who may not consider themselves ¶ environmentalists, but seek to advocate for ¶ regional environmental resources, are marginalized ¶ within the broader debate. Further, not only does ¶ this tactic set the discursive stage for a rational ¶ group of economically minded people versus ¶ irrational environmentalists (i.e., economy versus ¶ the environment), but it also uses environmental ¶ perception as an arena for political and economic ¶ projects (Heynen et al. 2007, 12). Thus the ¶ legitimacy of a neoliberal environment discourse is ¶ reinforced while delegitimizing alternatives. Conclusion¶ Thus far we have argued that multi-scale ¶ neoliberal discourses do more than obfuscate ¶ comprehensive understandings of the impacts of ¶ fracking on water resources. They also create a way ¶ of conducting conduct that normalizes the impacts ¶ fracking has on water resources. In this vein of ¶ thinking, Castree (2003) has asked, why should we ¶ care about the capitalization of nature? We contend ¶ that the socio-environmental risks of fracking are ¶ potentially high and it is largely rural communities ¶ who are vulnerable to these risks. At the same time, ¶ these communities must make land use decisions ¶ based on incomplete and competing forms of ¶ knowledge. One or our goals is to bring attention ¶ to the potential impacts of fracking and to develop ¶ a better understanding of the ways stakeholders ¶ perceive costs and benefits in order to make land ¶ use decisions.¶ But more broadly, we are interested in ¶ contributing to a context-specific analysis of the ways neoliberalism is (re)defining the relationships ¶ between people and the non-human world. As ¶ market approaches to environmental regulation ¶ become a more accepted, and perhaps a dominant ¶ part of governance strategy (See Anderson and ¶ Leal 2001), places like northeastern PA are, ¶ “written off for environmental destruction in the ¶ name of a higher purpose, such as the national ¶ interest” (Scott 2010, 31). These “sacrifice zones” ¶ assume an ecological disconnect between people ¶ and their environment, normalizing environmental ¶ degradation in some places while protecting ¶ others, and also assume no alternative uses of land ¶ or energy resources. This can be viewed as a form ¶ of remote environmental exploitation and brutality ¶ where the scalar issues make these sacrifice zones ¶ almost invisible to the larger nation and world. We ¶ feel that these struggles to (re)define the nature/¶ society relationship is about the power to ensure ¶ capital flows into specific hands, which will ¶ likely result in greater costs to other people and ¶ their environments. Formally investigating and ¶ deconstructing pro-fracking discourses is part of an ¶ ongoing project to come to terms with the realities ¶ involved with the transformation of the hydrosocial cycle and with the water-energy nexus, and ¶ to strive for a more equitable future.

The most popular techno-fix for global warming is green energy. If energy companies would only deploy wind, hydro, solar, geothermal or nuclear, then emission-intensive fossil fuels will eventually disappear. But will that actually work?¶ A new study by Richard York of the University of Oregon shows that it isn’t that simple. Rather than displacing fossil fuels, green energy sources have proven to be mostly additive.¶ “Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?” published this month in Nature Climate Change, discusses what happened when alternative energy sources were introduced in countries around the world, over the past fifty years.¶ Contrary to the accepted wisdom that new green energy replaces fossil-fuel use, York found that on average each unit of energy use from non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than a quarter of a unit of energy use from fossil-fuel sources.¶ The picture is worse with electricity, where each new unit generated from green sources displaced less than one-tenth of a unit of fossil-fuel-generated electricity.¶ York writes:¶ “Based on all of the results presented above, the answer to the question presented in the title of this paper – do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels? – is yes, but only very modestly. The common assumption that the expansion of production of alternative energy will suppress fossil-fuel energy production in equal proportion is clearly wrong.”¶ Why don’t the new sources replace the old? York identifies two key reasons: the inertia of a huge existing fossil-fuel infrastructure, and the power and influence of the coal and oil corporations.¶ “The failure of non-fossil energy sources to displace fossil ones is probably in part attributable to the established energy system where there is a lock-in to using fossil fuels as the base energy source because of their long-standing prevalence and existing infrastructure and to the political and economic power of the fossil-fuel industry.”¶ In other words, eliminating fossil-fuel as an energy source is at least as much a social and political problem as a technical one.¶ “Of course all societies need energy. So, obviously, if societies are to stop using fossil fuels they must have other energy sources. However, the results from the analyses presented here indicate that the shift away from fossil fuel does not happen inevitably with the expansion of non-fossil-fuel sources, or at least in the political and economic contexts that have been dominant over the past fifty years around the world….¶ “The most effective strategy for curbing carbon emissions is likely to be one that aims to not only develop non-fossil energy sources, but also to find ways to alter political and economic contexts so that fossil-fuel energy is more easily displaced and to curtail the growth in energy consumption as much as possible.¶ “A general implication of these findings is that polices aimed at addressing global climate change should not focus principally on developing technological fixes, but should also take into account human behaviour in the context of political, economic and social systems.”¶ The evidence shows that simply introducing green energy isn’t enough: the introduction must be accompanied by “explicit policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions.”¶ The article is published in a scientific journal, where political and social conclusions can only be expressed in muted form. But Richard York’s research and conclusions reinforce the argument that he and his co-authors (John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark) made more explicitly in their recent book, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Planet.¶ “We are confronting the question of a terminal crisis, threatening most life on the planet, civilization, and the very existence of future generations. … attempts to solve this through technological fixes, market magic, and the idea of a ‘sustainable capitalism’ are mere forms of ecological denial, since they ignore the inherent destructiveness of the current system of unsustainable development – capitalism.”